There are occasions when biological materials, such as bone, skin, soft tissue, cartilage, muscle, and the like, lack desired biological and biomechanical properties. Oftentimes, such occasions arise due to circumstances, including but not limited to accidents, illnesses, diseases, genetic defects, unexpected mutations, and medical procedures (such as chemotherapy), as well as sterilization and processing methods.
One available solution is to treat a biological material with a highly concentrated additive solution, such that a portion of the additive will diffuse into the biological material. Additives include such items as proteins, lipids, cells, bone marrow, bone morphogenic proteins (BMPs), and stem cells, to name a few. Unfortunately, there are several deficiencies with conventional methods of treating with additives.
First, it is oftentimes difficult and sometimes impossible to successfully penetrate biological materials with additives using conventional infusion methods. For instance, some biological materials can successfully thwart infusion attempts due to their diminutive pores, membranes, matrices, or protective outer layers. Therefore, known techniques often culminate in the incomplete infusion of an additive. For example, it is known that treating the exterior of a bone material with a highly concentrated BMP solution will encourage bone growth. However, a very high concentration of the protein solution is needed to penetrate the bone material. Even so, the solution is only able to penetrate the bone at a small depth. Therefore, typical treatments result in the growth of bone material in a hollow shell due to the concentration's inability to penetrate into the interior of the bone. This is highly problematic.
Second, some conventional infusion methods require a complicated sequence of steps that include numerous processing chambers and multiple solvents, chemicals and reagents, thereby increasing the costs associated with an infusion and making the process labor-intensive and prone to error.
Third, some conventional methods are not clean nor environmentally friendly. Instead, conventional methods use toxic solvents, chemicals and reagents, which may contaminate biological materials with undesirable residues and taints. In fact, certain solvents used with traditional methods of treating biological materials are prohibited from use in certain countries.